


Talking to Ghosts

by tuesdaymidnight



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Derek has a lot of feelings, Gen, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Post S2, Pre-Slash, Stiles has a lot of feelings too, babbling!Stiles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-02
Updated: 2012-10-02
Packaged: 2017-11-15 11:18:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/526717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesdaymidnight/pseuds/tuesdaymidnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Failure seems to be Derek Hale's lot in life, so he seeks solace in the cemetery that holds his family's remains. One morning he runs into Stiles there and something propels him to strike up a conversation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Talking to Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> This little fic is also known as the fic that didn't win me a meeting with Jeff Davis, but I thought I'd post it for posterity's sake. I might even write a second part that includes Jeep sex, because, well, Jeep sex. 
> 
> As always, thank you to OnTheTurningAway and coolbreeeze for being the best betas in the west.

Failure seemed to be Derek Hale's lot in life. 

He failed miserably at being an alpha. He failed to turn Jackson Whittemore into a functioning, non-homicidal werewolf. He failed to recruit Scott. He failed to keep Erica and Boyd in his pack. His own uncle was the first person he'd ever killed, and he even failed at that, too. 

So when he saw the alpha pack insignia on his crumbling front door, the only thing he could do was brace himself for more failure. He could smell the other alphas in Beacon Hills and he knew it was only a matter of time before his territory was challenged. He was on edge for a couples weeks after they first left their mark, but then the unexpected happened. They didn't do anything. They didn't attack. So Derek was left a sitting duck with a broken pack. 

Isaac was spending too much time with Scott and Deaton for comfort (and Derek would not acknowledge the marked improvement in Isaac's control since he had). Jackson was, let's face it, kind of a prick. And Peter, well, Peter was breathing down his neck and clearly had an ulterior motive.

The whole situation had totally spun out of his control, and giving up sounded like the best idea in the history of best ideas.

Derek needed help. 

But the ones who could help him were all gone.

There was a cemetery plot next to a small church on the outskirts of town. Buried in it were the charred remains of Derek's entire family, save Laura. While he escaped the physical scars that once marred Peter's body, the scars on his heart would never heal, would never fade, would always be fresh, on the verge of ripping open. 

Derek took to taking something of a morning constitutional to the cemetery. He ran most of the way in his alpha form, his instincts taking over, all the haunting thoughts that threatened to choke him going temporarily silent. 

He didn't leave flowers. It didn't occur to him to trim the crawling ivy off the headstones. They were just tangible placeholders for the future denizens of Beacon Hills. It mattered that they were there, who they represented, not what they looked like. Time would erode them eventually. Like it did all things. 

Derek usually sat down in front of the gravestones of his parents. It felt too weird to speak to them out loud, but he thought through all the questions in his mind he wished he could have asked them. What did they think Peter's intentions were? How could he get his betas back and earn their respect? What could he do to stop his string of failures?

The only thing that really comforted him was the fact that they probably wouldn't have answers. When you were born this way, born into a pack, it was like breathing. There was no learning curve; there was just growing up and being taken care of and fitting in. 

No one could have prepared him for the emptiness or the choking feeling of desperation that overtook him when he realized that everyone who had ever loved him was gone. 

Death was always harder on the living. It was a simple fact that Derek felt acutely as true.

Some days, he would sit in the family plot all morning, watching the sun climb up in the sky, while imploring his dead family for answers to unanswerable questions. Other days, he would be so angry—at Kate, at Peter, at himself—that it was all he could do not to knock the stones down and crush them until they were rubble. 

He never cried.

All of his tears had been wasted when it first happened, when Laura was there to comfort him. She didn't make him feel weak for crying. He understood then that there were only so many tears a person could cry in their lifetime, and he'd used his all up. 

Emptiness protected him. 

There was cold comfort in the fact that he had nothing left to lose. 

When you spent your time with spirits, you were at least guaranteed they would never leave.

One morning, though, Stiles Stilinski was there amidst the ghosts, interrupting Derek's routine. He didn't see Derek and clearly didn't hear him. Derek's senses were sharper, keener, but Stiles had the worst sense of self-preservation Derek had ever seen in a human being. Derek could have ripped the kid's throat out before Stiles even knew he was there. He was tempted to teach him a lesson, but he was worried he might go too far, annoyed as he was at Stiles' voice filling his customary stolid silence with chatter. For a minute Derek wondered if Stiles was on a phone, callously taking a call in this sacred place, but then he realized the one-sided conversation was directed toward one of the headstones.

Derek squinted until he could read “Barbara Stilinski” on the marble stone.

That's when Derek realized he had something in common with Stiles. They both spoke to specters. 

Later, when people asked how he and Stiles became friends, he never really could explain what propelled him forward that day. 

Instead of scaring Stiles on purpose, Derek maintained a respectable distance and cleared his throat. 

Stiles jumped anyway.

“How do you always do that?!”

“Not my fault you have feeble human senses and you don't pay attention.”

“My feeble human senses have gotten me by just fine for the last 16 years. Or they did, until the supernatural population explosion decided I hadn't had enough staring death in the face.”

Stiles stopped talking as he seemingly remembered where he was, his eyes drifting to the gravestone in front of him.

“Your mom?” Derek offered, still unsure of what he was doing.

When Stiles didn't respond right away, Derek wondered if he had already screwed this up too.

“Yeah. I used to come every week, but then it became every month. After everything that happened, though, I guess it made me realize how much I miss her. I can't help but think that she would understand all of this.” Stiles paused and then straightened his shoulders resolutely. “I can't keep lying to my dad, you know.”

Derek nodded curtly. “Mrs. McCall should probably be there when you tell him.”

Stiles whipped his head around to fully look at Derek for the first time. 

“I can't stop you. I'd rather you be smart about it.”

“So you're saying I should call off the skywriter, then?”

Derek didn't justify the question with a response. Stiles kept talking anyway.

“She already knows, you know.” He gestured to the stone. “But she also knows about the time I accidentally broke the fence in the backyard and blamed it on the neighbor's German Shepherd. I swear it still gives me the side-eye whenever I walk past it. Don't tell anyone that, by the way, especially my dad.”

“I promise not to bring it up at the next cop-accused murderer meeting.”

“Was that a joke? Did you just crack a joke? Color me surprised. I thought you had a lobotomy on your sense of humor.”

“Shut up, Stiles.” 

He could have walked away at that moment; he almost did. But there was something pinning him to the spot. 

Stiles carried on. 

“She was sick for so long, it was almost a relief when she finally went. It took me a long time to get over that guilt. What kind of son am I, that at the end, I hoped she would die so she wouldn't have to be in pain another day?”

Stiles tilted his head toward Derek. 

What Stiles didn't understand was that Derek's guilt was different. What was guilt to the teen was mercy to Derek. But Stiles shared a harsh truth about himself, about his mom, whom he obviously still loved fiercely, death be damned. 

Derek took a deep breath, not knowing if he could actually get the words out.

“Werewolves heal quickly. Faster than fire burns.”

Stiles face went ashen, realizing what that meant. 

He didn't say anything right away, which was significant given his modus operandi. The horror settled in on his face until finally he whispered, “How do you get up from that?”

Derek didn't reply right away, letting the question hang in the air, because honestly, he didn't know. It was the question he never asked. He closed his eyes, hoping the energy from all the lost lives surrounding them would make him feel something again, even if it couldn't give him an answer. Derek never thought about how, he thought about why every single minute of every single day, but how? 

“I'm not sure you do.”

Stiles seemed to come back to himself a little, finding his words.

“Look, I know you don't like me all that much, and I'm not exactly part of your pack, but if you ever want to, well, not talk, because I know you don't do that... I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm a pro at denial. It's a skill I fine-tuned right after my mom died and my dad started talking exclusively to the bottom of a whiskey bottle. I knew we needed help. It was just easier to compartmentalize everything. There's a filing cabinet in my brain with a whole drawer for grief and another for rejection from Lydia. I just lock them up and pretend they aren't there. I need the space for researching goblins and golems and holy shit, please tell me golems are actually real.”

Derek shook his head, but mostly in disbelief. 

It wasn't what he ever expected to find in the cemetery, but a weird feeling started creeping into his chest, and he didn't feel quite so alone.

Stiles was there again the next morning, and the morning after. Eventually their conversations moved away from the shadows of their pasts and back into the world of the living. 

Derek decided to rebuild his childhood home, and Stiles, wordlessly for once, committed his summer vacation to helping him. Derek knew in theory he needed permits from the city, but if there was anyone competent working for the city council, they would have condemned the building already. Derek had no experience with construction, but he had superhuman strength, and Stiles' enthusiastic research abilities went beyond the supernatural.

Anyway, Derek just didn't have it in him to start over from the ground up, to do things right.

If alphas were going to come onto his land and mark it, he wanted there to at least be something other than the broken shell of his life—the image of his failure—waiting for them.

They never talked about the important things. Stiles had already confessed what haunted him most, and Derek couldn't. Even if he wanted to, the words weren't there to explain the terrors that still plagued his dreams. Instead, the running commentary Stiles gave about the redeeming features of movie remakes over prequels (or his complaints about how whipped Scott was even though he and the Argent girl were still supposedly on a break) filled the silence that had come so close to choking Derek when he was alone in the woods day in and day out. 

Sometimes Derek couldn't help it, and he would take the bait.

“But historically speaking, most colonization ends in violence.”

“On this planet, maybe, with humans, but who's to say they're trying to colonize? Maybe it's a recon mission! Maybe they want to engage in trade. Maybe they want to start a breeding program. There's no reason to think that all alien species are traveling to an extremely distant planet as an act of war.”

“That's all speculation.”

“You're just buying into what Hollywood has told you about aliens. What you aren't taking into account is that aliens have landed on this planet already. They've probably already infiltrated Congress and the Federal Reserve and whoever chooses what songs play on the radio.”

“That's absurd.”

“Yeah, well, until a few months ago, I thought it was absurd to think werewolves existed.”

Derek had no comeback for that.

Some days even he wondered if the Argents were right about his kind being an abomination that had no business living in this world.

One day Derek finally asked, “Why do you talk so much?” It was in jest when he said it, or it was meant to be, but it had been a long time since Derek had actually felt like laughing.

“Because if I don't fill the silence, then I start thinking about how life is unfair and how much I miss her, and when she was in the hospital bed she was tired all the time—too tired to talk—so she always asked me to. I started out telling her about my day, but that was usually boring, so then I gave her a running commentary of every inane thought that popped into my head. It's a nervous habit now.” Stiles' voice lowered to a whisper. “Bad things happen when it's too quiet.”

Derek didn't know what he was expecting, but it wasn't that.

“Why don't you talk?” Stiles threw back.

“For a long time, there was only Laura to talk to, and then I was alone.”

Stiles seemed to be expecting that answer, because he got a now-familiar twinkle in his eye. 

“Aw, poor Sourwolf, good at being a creepy stalker, bad at making friends. It's okay, you can admit it. You like listening to me talk. Don't lie. I'm way better company than Uncle Zombie.” 

Derek laughed. He actually laughed. 

Stiles took it as agreement.

He was right, though. From the ashes of Derek's grief, rose Stiles Stilinski. The only thing Derek could do was laugh at the absurdity.

You couldn't compare one loss to the other. Stiles didn't know what it was like to lose a pack, a family; although he started to understand that Derek couldn't bear to lose another. Derek didn't know what it was like to watch the most important person in your life painfully fade away, but he knew watching Scott slowly being taken by Allison hurt Stiles more deeply than he would ever admit.

The ghosts of their pasts, their inadequacies, their fears, their failures, they didn't go away. But as they sat up on the rebuilt roof of the Hale house at the end of summer, side by side, emotionally constipated and half-assing their way through rebuilding their lives, something loosened in Derek's chest. 

And the thought crossed his mind that maybe he wouldn't fail if he had Stiles on his side.


End file.
